Adobe uses U+F634 - U+F8FE. You can find details at
http:
//partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/typeforum/corporateuse.txt
In their documents, they talk about the "Corporate Use subarea"
in a way that suggests that there is some officially sanctioned
organisation of portions of the PUA. The Unicode 2.0 book does
talk about "the Corporate Use subarea", but that term is
nowhere given any further definition except to say that the
"Corporate" portion begins at the top, U+F8FF, and extends
down, and that the "end user" portion begins at the bottom,
U+E000, and extends upward. You have to decide where you fit
best. (Or you may be like some of us who anticipate that we may
need the whole lot, and hope that the commercial software that
we use doesn't conflict with that.)
Adobe has promoted a coordinated use of the "Corporate Use
subarea" among big players:
"In fact, we envision the CUS as a collaborative effort among
vendors, wherein each vendor ensures that new assignments do
not overlap with existing ones. This shared approach ensures
optimal use of the limited UVs available. It also avoids the
obvious problems that applications would have in identifying
the vendor of a font in order to determine which vendor's CUS
assignments were in effect."
(From http:
//partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/typeforum/unicodegn.html#4.b
)
I personally am not encouraged by this since I'd rather see
commercial software developers leave the use of the PUA
entirely up to end users, except perhaps for data that will
only ever be processed within their app. (E.g., if you were
trying to develop a new way to write a language - e.g. ASL, or
English with ideographs - and you needed, say, 5847 codepoints,
and you were trying to create documents using your script in
the hope of promoting use of your creation and were using
Pagemaker to do so, you'd probably be a little frustrated if
Pagemaker was doing something like insisting on printing U+F66E
as nothing or as a-macron instead of your custom glyph that you
laboured so hard to create.) Fortunately, I have seen no
indication that any other 3rd party developer is trying to
divvy up the PUA in this way, and Adobe themselves appear to
suggest (though it's not completely clear) that this would only
be temporary:
"In addition, we regard CUS assignments as useful until
OpenType features become widely available in fonts and
supported by applications."
(op cit)
In the same document, they provide the following information
about others' use of the PUA:
"Apple has published CUS assignments in the range U+F800
through U+F8FF. Adobe uses CUS assignments in the range U+F600
through U+F7FF, as well as the same assignments for some
characters in Symbol and Zapf Dingbats from the Apple-defined
range. Microsoft is treating the range U+F000 through U+F0FF as
the definition of its symbol code page."
Peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:51 EDT